After Truss, who?

Sir Graham Brady has just given a statement outside the St Stephen’s entrance of parliament. The chair of the 1922 Committee said the new prime minister will be in place before the fiscal statement on 31 October, and that the party rules currently mean members will be taking part in the truncated leadership election to replace Liz Truss.

There are a lot of candidates who could stand to replace the Prime Minister. Including the membership means that some of those candidates who might be feared by a good chunk of their colleagues could still do extremely well if they make it through to the final round. Truss did not command the support of the parliamentary party when she made it through to that round: she came second to Rishi Sunak among MPs and at that stage only had 113 MPs to Sunak’s 137. In fact, it is worth remembering that one of the reasons it took so long for Conservatives to get rid of Boris Johnson was that they couldn’t agree on who might replace him and a significant number of backbenchers were worried that it would end up being Truss.

As Sir Graham acknowledged with typical understatement just now, the circumstances of Truss’s departure have not exactly been a great moment for the Tories. He said: ‘It’s certainly not a circumstance I would wish to see.’ His meeting with Truss this morning was the decisive moment for her premiership. He is about to lead the party’s backbench trade union to its fifth prime minister and probably its most chaotic period yet, even worse than the chaos of the past few months. 

The party did not use the last leadership contest to resolve its fundamental questions about what it stands for, what modern-day conservatism means and how it should approach the economy. There is now even more personal animosity between MPs and emotion over what is happening to the party. Whoever takes over will be lucky to stay leader to the next election, which the party will almost certainly lose ahead of the period of soul searching that it is clearly yearning for.